Software for managing a virtualized data center is responsible for monitoring physical hosts and virtual machines (VMs) running in the physical hosts and, further, for performing management operations such as provisioning and configuration tasks. One example of such management software is vSphere™ by VMware of Palo Alto, Calif. The complete set of hosts, VMs, data storage elements (datastores), networks, and the organization of these elements into data centers, clusters, and resource pools, managed by such software, is commonly referred to as a virtualized computer inventory (hereinafter referred to as the “inventory”). In particular, the virtualized computer inventory comprises both topological data related to the foregoing elements and the configuration settings thereof.
Under certain circumstances, migration or reconstruction of an inventory may be desired or needed. For example, when a given cluster and the settings associated therewith have been tested in development and are ready to be moved into production, a production inventory is generated based on the development inventory. To give another example, an existing inventory that works well for a data center or across multiple data centers may be replicated by administrators for use with different data centers.
One existing technique for performing inventory migrations or reconstructions is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/020,300, filed Feb. 3, 2011 and entitled “Programmatic Snapshot and Revert of Virtualized Data Center Inventory,” which is incorporated by reference herein. According to this technique, a VM management center is queried to retrieve and store relationships between various entities, the permissions and roles associated with those entities, and the configuration settings of those entities. From this stored data, code for reconstructing the inventory of the virtualized computer system is generated.
A reconstructed virtualized computing inventory may not always be an exact copy of the original virtualized computing inventory. For example, an error may occur during the reconstruction of a virtualized computing inventory, or the reconstructed virtualized computing inventory may be based on erroneously-analyzed topology and/or configuration settings of an original virtualized computing inventory. Therefore, it is desirable to confirm this after reconstruction.